Category Archives: Brookoff Dance Repertory Company

Crashing through the membrane: I still remember the first intimate ballet showing I was privileged to see, in Joffrey Ballet co-founder Gerald Arpino’s no-frills basement studio near the Church Street Safeway in San Francisco. The intake and exhalation of breath, the contours of the leg muscles and the grasping of hands right in front of you; there’s nothing like it for appreciating the hard work and honesty that goes into dances rigorously created and earnestly performed. Even moreso when the choreography is built around connections: of partners, of circles (evoking the primordial dances around a fire so eloquently described by Curt Sachs) — of the delicate digits of the pianist to the expressive hands and torsos of the dancers and the musicality of the dancemaker. New Yorkers will be gifted (much as I protest the recent lazy perversion of our language which turns nouns into graceless verbs, trampling the correct and more elegant versions in the process — right? — this term seems to ring just here) with such an opportunity Saturday in Brooklyn, when Mathew Brookoff and his Brookoff Dance Repertory Company occupy the Duffy Studio of Brooklyn’s Mark Morris Dance Center from 5 to 6 p.m., variously occupying Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces and a Schubert Impromptu in the veteran choreo’s anything but impromptu duet entwinings. (I plead for an exception for that one from Messieurs Strunk & White.) In addition to these new sculptures in motion, Brookoff also expands his recent group work “Fracture” (above) from six to 12 dancers. Free and open to the public. Pictured at the rear, from left to right: Andrew Harper, Tiffany Mangulabnan, and Jordan Miller; in front: Ali Block, Amy Saunder, and Brian Gephart. — PB-I (inspired by Harris Green)